Grouping Android Tag Synonyms on Stack Overflow

Abstract

On Stack Overflow, more than 38,000 diverse tags are used to classify posts. The Stack Overflow community provides tag synonyms to reduce the number of tags that have the same or similar meaning. In our previous research, we used those synonym pairs to derive a number of strategies to create tag synonyms automatically.In this work, we continue this line of research and present an approach to group tag synonyms to meaningful topics. We represent our synonyms as directed, weighted graphs, and investigate several graph community detection algorithms to build meaningful groups of tags, also called tag communities.We apply our approach to the tags obtained from Android-related Stack Overflow posts and evaluate the resulting tag communities quantitatively with various community metrics. In addition, we evaluate our approach qualitatively through a manual inspection and comparison of a random sample of tag communities. Our results show that we can cluster the Android tags to 2,481 meaningful tag communities. We also show how these tag communities can be used to derive trends of topics of Android-related questions on Stack Overflow.